I remember when we first met. It was 28 years ago, at the Bloomingdale’s flagship in New York. I was with my fiancé, Andy, clutching a wedding registry clipboard, bumbling my way around displays of crystal champagne glasses and platters and other fancy things that seemed to belong to some future fantasy self. I was 26 that year, living in a small Brooklyn fourth-floor walk-up, engaged to the guy I first noticed in my college Russian literature class.
And there it was, a beacon of orange amid the quicksilver saucepans and skillets: the round, enameled cast-iron five-and-a-half-quart Le Creuset Dutch oven. I instantly knew we belonged together. Besides the fact that it was beautiful, it reminded me of my mom’s Dutch oven, the one that sat on the stovetop when I was growing up, loyally churning out beef stews and tomato sauces and other mainstays of a 1980s working mom’s repertoire. Her pot was oval and smaller, but it was the same color as the one in front of me, that signature Le Creuset “volcanique.” Mom bought hers in the early 1970s, after Julia Child made her feel like no home cook could make a proper boeuf Bourguignon without one. I registered for mine that day, hoping someone else — or even a group of people — might shell out more money than I had ever spent on one item on a single pot.
For the first years after Andy and I were married, I felt as if I were playing make-believe, going through the motions of things that grown-ups did. One of those things was teaching myself how to cook dinner. I made dinners my mother-in-law suggested that sounded straight out of a 1950s cookbook; I clipped recipes from magazines with names like scallops Provençal and torta di patate because anything in another language sounded sophisticated to me; I joined a cookbook-of-the-month club, which introduced me to a new author named Ina Garten. In between, I was heating up Boca Burgers in the microwave and tossing penne with jarred tomato sauce, not realizing those dinners were just as important as the ones I’d find in glammy, glossy Gourmet. I wouldn’t know until much later that the slow work of becoming an adult was less about ta-da moments than it was about showing up and doing the work every day.
One fortuitous day early on in the marriage, Andy discovered a copy of Marcella Hazan’s “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking” and set his sights on making her famous Bolognese. The recipe called for a heavy, enameled cast-iron casserole. I remember plunking my new pot on the stovetop, as bright as a harvest moon, heavy as a millstone, then making our way through the recipe, adding the butter, the aromatics and the meat. Then the milk, the wine and the tomatoes. The sauce bubbled away for hours — don’t rush it, Marcella was always warning — before we tossed it with tagliatelle. We didn’t know it that night, but we had discovered the recipe we would make for almost every person who would sit at our cramped kitchen table over the next five years. Good lord, that Bolognese was delicious. I loved its deeply layered flavor and hint of sweetness, but what I loved more was how the sauce became the cornerstone of a comforting ritual with friends.
When my kids came along, our cooking lives got simpler. We sheet-panned our way through the chicken finger years in the suburbs. The Dutch oven emerged on Saturday nights for what we started calling the Instant Dinner Party. In between morning soccer games and afternoon birthday parties, we’d braise a pork shoulder in tomato sauce for hours, making the house smell like the most inviting place on Earth.
There was a lot of chili. There was also minestrone in January, corn chowder in August and baked beans in October. My pot’s orange finish started developing a speckled patina, its bottom blackening from a decade of love and use. By this point, I was a food writer and when the pot appeared in photos on my website, readers would comment, “I love that you keep things real!” I took this as a compliment. When I wrote my first cookbook in 2012, the pot became a cover girl. But I confess there were stretches during which my loyalty wavered — in the 2010s, as our children got bigger, so did their portion sizes. A larger pot became my go-to and my original orange pot got pushed to the back of the cabinet. I neglected her when my daughters’ friends would pile into the house for chili, costumed Dwights from “The Office” and Tintins and witches helping themselves from the cauldron. She was too small, I thought, for when the cross-country team came on Friday nights for pre-race carbo-loading.
It took a pandemic for the two of us to find each other again. While more ambitious quarantined cooks nurtured sourdough starters, I rediscovered Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Bread. The recipe called for a cast-iron pot that could withstand intense heat, and since one pot was busy making viral chickpea stews, I climbed up the step stool to retrieve its grease-streaked cousin. There it sat, Giving Tree-like, ready to serve: Come, boy, use me for your bread. And I did. The pot spent a good portion of 2020 sitting in a 450-degree oven, regularly turning out crusty boules that felt like magic during those early, dark days of quarantine.
All those hours under fire took a toll — the blackened bottom crept up its sides, pushing its once-vibrant finish beyond the point of patina. There were ways to clean it, but I knew I never would. My pot, stained and steadfast, told the story of a life built in noisy kitchens and around crowded tables, a battle-tested warrior that said: This took time. I’m all grown up now.
Just before our 26th wedding anniversary, our kids went off to college and we returned to city living, moving to an apartment that was half the size of our house. Among other things, this meant making some ruthless decisions with kitchen gear. The juicer and the not-so-high-powered blender wouldn’t be part of our empty nest adventure, but the Dutch oven made the cut. And in my smaller life, it’s my enameled cast-iron Velveteen Rabbit that sits on the front burner, ready for whatever comes next.
Jenny Rosenstrach writes the newsletter Dinner: A Love Story.
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